Discursive Construction Of The Host's Pragmatic Identity

Research on identity and identity construction has been the focus of social science research in recent years.Many scholars have carried out in-depth research on it in different fields.However,there is still no unified definition of “identity”.With the development of pragmatics,it has been found that the use of language in specific contexts plays a very important role in identity construction.The study of pragmatic identity has aroused widespread interest,and more and more scholars have begun to study the dynamic identity construction in linguistic interactions.This study focuses on the discursive construction of the host's pragmatic identities in the program.The host is usually very proficient in oral language,and has obvious characteristics in discourse choice,which are embodied in the construction of pragmatic identity.Drawing on Chen's “Pragmatic Identity Theory”(2013)with Verschueren's“Linguistic Adaptation Theory”(1988),the study selects parts of the discourse of the famous American TV Talk Show The Ellen DeGeneres Show as the analysis corpus,and qualitatively analyzes the discursive construction of the host's pragmatic identities in the program.The study mainly answers three questions:(1)What pragmatic identities does the host construct in the talk show?(2)How does the host construct these identities in the talk show?(3)Why does the host construct these identities in the talk show?The results show that the host constructs a variety of pragmatic identities in the whole talk show,mainly including the atmosphere activist,guest introducer,topic guider,evaluator,explainer,instructor,summarizer and listener.As regards identity construction,Ellen constructs the identity of an atmosphere activist by choosing discourse content and speech act;the identity as a guest introducer by choosing style,discourse mode and lexical choices;the identity as a topic guider by choosing discourse features,discourse content and grammatical features;the identity as an evaluator by choosing discourse features and lexical choices;the identity as an explainer by choosingdiscourse content and speech act;the identity as an instructor by choosing speech act and phonetic features;and the identity as a summarizer by choosing speech act and phonetic features.As for the identity as a listener,it doesn't involve the discourse,so it has no discursive choice.As regards reasons behind all the pragmatic identities construction,they are to adapt to physical world,social world and mental world.In the physical world,the host has different pragmatic identities to adapt to different phases of the show and different positions of the stage that she takes up.In social world,social distance and power relation are discussed in constructing different pragmatic identities.In mental world,different pragmatic identities are constructed to adapt to intentions of the host.The study only focuses on the pragmatic identity construction of the host Ellen,and does not have a general significance.The author hopes to provide a perspective to arouse more interest in this topic.And research on the discourse construction of the host's pragmatic identity not only plays an important role in the identity construction and discourse choice of the host,but also plays a leading part in the proper identity construction of the communicative parties in daily communication.